Abstract

Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.

Susan Carol Rogers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University and co-founder of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. She is the author of books on rural France including Paysans, Femmes et Citoyens: Luttes pour le pouvoir dans un village lorrain (1980, with Claude Karnoouh and Hugues Lamarche) and Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community (1991).

Anne Raulin is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Paris West-Nanterre-La Defense and a member of the Laboratory of Urban Anthropology at CNRS, Ivry. She has published ethnographic fieldwork on both New York and Paris respectively in Manhattan ou la mémoire insulaire (1997) and L’ethnique est quotidian: Diasporas, marchés et cultures metropolitaines (2000) and is the author of a general textbook on urban anthropology, Anthropologie Urbaine ([2001] 2007).